[2][3] Beginning in 1832, Owen and his followers attempted to implement labour notes in London and Glasgow by establishing marketplaces and banks that accepted them.
These bazaars were ultimately failures, but the idea of labour vouchers appeared in substantially similar forms in France in the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
According to Marx, the introduction of labour vouchers would create a lazy society and economy as there would not be concurrency between employers and employees, so nobody would be able to tell what the optimal (minimal) time which was needed to produce something would be.
To summarize Marx's opinion in the Poverty of Philosophy, the labour voucher is not suitable to create a new socialist society, and the theory of Proudhon and others is nothing more than a utopian apology of the existing capitalist system.
Marx was adamant in saying that labour vouchers were not a form of money as they could not circulate—a problem he pointed out with Owen's system of labour-time notes.
[citation needed] However, they were later advocated by Karl Marx, despite disagreeing with the manner in which they were implemented by Owen, as a way of dealing with immediate and temporary shortages upon the establishment of socialism.
[4][non-primary source needed]During the Great Depression, European communities implemented local currencies with varying success.
In Nazi Germany, Hjalmar Schacht (Adolf Hitlers finance-minister and banker) applied a kind of labour-voucher named MEFO-bond, whose aim was to hide the rearmament program's expenditures before the Western world as the big trusts did not pay by money-transfer to each other, but bought MEFO bonds from the state and changed these bonds in closed circuit.
[5][non-primary source needed] The system has also been criticized by many libertarian socialists, particularly anarcho-communists, who propose abolishing all remuneration and prices and advocate instead a gift economy with the value determined by calculation in kind.
In criticizing collectivist anarchism's retaining of labour vouchers and cheques, Peter Kropotkin said: [F]or after having proclaimed the abolition of private property, and the possession in common of all means of production, how can they uphold the wages system in any form?
[6][7][non-primary source needed]The World Socialist Movement has argued against using labour vouchers as either a permanent or a temporary system while transitioning to their desired anarcho-communist economy based on free access.